The Final Goodbye

In the cold, gray days,
you walked away
with no goodbye,
to carry through
the cold, gray days.

Broken Glass

The pieces of broken glass
lie scattered,
their shades and tones
of sparkling color
crushed
under an unseeing weight.

Days and nights,
fog and rain and snow
follow,
one after the other,
over and over and over

Before someone picks up the
scattered pieces,
bringing them together
to make
something new
and beautiful.

I wake up
from a decades-dream
to discover
I wasn't sleeping.

Regrets swirl around in my head
like lyrics to an overused song.

A water color glass
where paint is added
bit by bit
until
it is all
muddy
          black. 

On a Bridge with Munch

Faceless
and voiceless,
I stand on the bridge
between yesterday
and tomorrow,
a cartoon figure,
fat
and flat.
I open my mouth,
but out comes
no sound.
I open my eyes,
but see nothing there.
The world is a Gaussian blur
of painterly impressionism.
I have
no
face. 

The promise
in an old photograph
is in the smoke-filled room,
rising seductively
from the cigarettes
perched precariously
on the side
of the coffee tables,
it makes me squint.
My vision distorted,
I see
what is not there.

Hypocrisy after Emily Dickinson

The red and angry, swollen spot
cannot be ignored.
The reaching out
becomes a hiss--
instead of kindness,
sword.

What should be gentle
hides its shell
and prays for camouflage. 
The love, the helping,
doesn't bloom.
The grace, in sabotage. 

Nothing

There are a lot of blank spaces

as I look back

but

         blanks

                      are what I'm used to--

blanks

               are what we got a lot of

                                                     back then.

The story

                 has been filled in,

                                            drawn on,

                                                              made up

                                                                                as I went along

because fiction

             is better than

                                                     nothing.